


The Unearthly Amy

by aldriankyrrith



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Other, short story collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-25
Updated: 2014-11-25
Packaged: 2018-02-26 23:21:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2670179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aldriankyrrith/pseuds/aldriankyrrith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she was seven, Amelia Pond had an imaginary friend, and they traveled the universe together.  And then she came back, once more a child, irrevocably changed.  Following a most unearthly child, and the lives she touched.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Undaunted

**Author's Note:**

> This idea originated on the Doctor Who brainstorms thread, when JadeCriminal posted the basic idea of an AU in which Eleven, when he left Amy after his initial regeneration, came back in the time he originally promised, rather than twelve years late. I found the idea a fascinating one, and received permission to put my own spin on it, focusing the narrative not on the perspective of Amy and the Doctor, but the normal people who interact with her. How would Amy, an apparent child who is in actuality so much more than anything they could conceive, look like from their point of view?
> 
> Each individual chapter of this story, I hope, will tell a single self contained story. It won't be bounded by any straight linear progression through time. The first chapter begins when Amy's already eleven, and for all we know by that time she could have stopped traveling completely. The next could take place in the direct aftermath of her journey with the Doctor.
> 
> It is my hope that each chapter will add a different piece to the puzzle of Amy Pond, add a few new nuances to the person she could have become, if the Doctor had kept his original promise, each building up that mosaic a little bit more, whilst being, on their own terms, completely self contained.
> 
> Feedback is always, appreciated.

I never had the most stable of childhoods. My father, a former career soldier who after retiring had been picked up by a top secret UN task force, frequently found himself moved from one station to another, and I was dragged along.

He was a big man, with a long nasty scar down the side of his right leg. When strangers asked him about where he got it, he always kept mum. It was a story, he said, that was impossible to believe. He told it to me once, back when I was only nine. It was a ridiculous tale, back from his time in the army, about monsters that could assume the forms of others and it involved an eccentric miracle worker, accompanied by a red headed child. I never believed a word of it.

When I turned eleven, all of that changed.

In my youth, I was mean. I will make no equivocations about that. I was a bully and a brute and I got off on making hell for the other children.

It helped that I was large for my age. I was the product of what we call early development. At eleven, I could have passed for fourteen. I was stronger, faster and more athletic than the other children. I was the one who accosted girls and boys on the playground for spare change. I was the one everyone feared and no one dared to cross.

Had my father known, I have no doubts he would have put me over his knee. He was big about honor and heroism, but no one tattled. Not if they didn’t want to get really hurt.

When I was eleven, we moved to a small town in Glouchestershire named Leadworth. It was an ordinary place which, unbeknownst to the people residing within it, held an extraordinary secret.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t very happy when we arrived. For one thing, there’s not much to see or do in that town. It’s a rather boring little hamlet actually, and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to moving there.

I enrolled in the local school, and was introduced to my class. Most of the students were just like any of the other children I’d run into over the years, and they looked upon me with a mix of interest and trepidation. There was no one in that grade who was near my size and, within a matter of days, I was ruling my class with the same surety that I had ruled all the others.

Each week, I hit up a different student for pocket money and those that refused had their teeth knocked out. Very soon, I was a source of fear. I was the boogeyman made flesh, and I was happy to be so. I intimidated everyone. With one exception.

Every school has its resident outcasts, those children that don’t fit in right. Ours was Amy Pond. She was an orphan, living with her aunt, small for her age with long red hair and green eyes. She kept herself aloof and didn’t associate with the other children, save Rory Williams, a small and shy child who she protected fiercely.

And she told the most outrageous fantasies, about her raggedy man that came from the stars. All of us looked at her as if she was a little loony, but she ignored us and continued to live in her fantasies. We sometimes made fun of her, my gang and I, and she very rarely reacted. It was as if she viewed herself above us all, for all that she seemed herself an immature child.

But there was something off about Amy Pond. Occasionally, when we pushed her too far and her green eyes would flash with something ancient and terrifying, I found myself flinching and afraid. And then she would go back with Rory, returning to her stories and her fantasies and the rest of us would watch, and we would remember that momentary flash of something.

She usually stuck to the back of the classroom with Rory, and spent her lunch hours hanging about near the swing sets, with her head tilted upwards, watching the clouds. Sometimes, I saw her cry silently and, as I watched, I had the strange impression that she was so much older than I was. And then she’d catch my eye and go back to being her eleven year old self, eccentric and sullen, but unmistakably a child.

Where the rest of the class was scared of me, she wasn’t. Where most kids, even her friend Rory, instinctively turned away when I looked their way, she returned my gaze with something fierce and uncompromising. I was always the first to blink.

I hated her. Because she should have been so weak. As the odd girl, the dreamer with the imaginary friend and her head in the clouds, she should have been one of the victims.

But, even as we mocked her, we were all in awe of her. Rory, the students, even myself: we could all tell, with the same utter assurance that we knew the sky was blue or that the sun would rise tomorrow morning, that she was something special. Unique. She had qualities rare in children: strength of will, empathy. She was someone important, even if none of us knew why.

I was the bully, the student everyone feared, but she was something far beyond my capacity to tear down. I knew it. She knew it. The entire class knew it.

I made hell for the other students, and occasionally I went beyond my usual tactics and left my victims black and blue. Whenever she caught me at that kind of fighting, her eyes would turn cold as frost. She never raised her voice, or even said anything much at all, but every time she would turn that stare upon me, with those frightening eyes, I would lay down my fists and allow the other student to flee unbothered.

And then she would smile at me, a small pitying smile. As if I, of all people, was someone she should feel sorry for.

More than anything, I wanted to wipe that smile off her face.

I soon got past my fear and my awe and endeavored to make her the victim. I would track her down after school, with a desire to knock her teeth out. But she was fast and, every time, she escaped me. And the following morning, she would return to class, sit down next to me and give me that knowing, disapproving look, and my loathing would increase.

For weeks, we continued the game. I would try to waylay her after school, or in the minutes before class, and every time she would dance out of range, slippery as an eel. And as I focused my attention upon her, I lost interest in all the others.

And with every failure, I found myself losing a bit more of my reputation. More often, I saw the other kids looking back at me, and now they could meet my stare without flinching.

So, desperate to regain my cache, to make an example of the funny eccentric once and for all, I crossed the one line I shouldn’t have dared cross. I laid Rory Williams into the mud and made him spit out one of his teeth, and I smiled like a shark when I noticed Amy there amongst the crowd.

She didn’t smile at me that time. She had her lips pursed and arms crossed and, with a sigh, she beckoned me to follow.

“I think it’s time we settled this snit once and for all,” she said through her thick Scottish brogue.

I agreed. Finally, it seemed this time she wasn’t running away.

“You know,” she continued as we walked side by side, still not showing the slightest inkling of fear. “I really don’t understand why you keep hurting people. It must be a sad way to live a life.”

I loomed over her, with my hands in my pockets, and she met my eyes as casual as ever.

“Anyway, you went after me and I could forgive that. I can take care of myself after all.” Something flashed in her eyes then, something dangerous. It was the kind of look that my father would get, when I had behaved badly. “But you hurt one of my friends, and that crossed a line.”

I won’t lie, I was afraid. She was smaller than me, one of the smallest girls in our class. Yet for all my bluster, I couldn’t deny that I was sweating. Because when I met her eyes, what I saw was not fear, or even dislike. What I saw was a predator playing the role of a child. A lion amongst the lambs, and I backed off.

“I’m not going to hurt you Daniel,” she said, her words calm but there was a controlled fury underneath them. “I’m not a bully after all. Not like you. Though I would appreciate it if you listened to my story. You might learn something useful.”

“What are you talking about?”

She smiled at me, smug and knowing. “Tell me, are you related to Alexander Brook?”

I looked back at her, “You should know he’s my father.”

She nodded, “Good. That should make things easier. Now, listen to this story closely. I’d rather not repeat it to anyone.”

And she weaved a tale that was impossible to believe. About a small military unit, training in the mountains of Scotland, some ten years before either of us were born.

“You know, I believe I was eight at the time. It gets awfully difficult to keep track of time when traveling with my Raggedy Man.”

She spoke with something wistful in her eyes and, though it was impossible, I believed her. Those were not the eyes of a liar. Nor were they the eyes of someone deluded.

And the story she weaved, impossible as it was to believe, was one that I’d heard before, back when I was nine. I didn’t believe it then, but hearing it now, from a different perspective and from a different voice, I could no longer deny it all to be true. I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach as she kept speaking.

She told me impossible things, of a species of alien called Zygons, which were large and red and looked like a cross between a lobster and a pea pod. I should have burst out laughing at the absurdity of that description, but it reminded me of something my father once drew, and I found instead that my blood had chilled. Because she was there, when my father’s entire platoon was wiped out, and he barely escaped with his life. Amy, on the other hand, was unblemished.

She spoke about how the Zygons had come to that planet, after their ship had crashed, waiting for reinforcements to come pick them up. She told me how they made their way to my father's post and killed the sentries and used their bodies to disguise themselves. And she told me how she and her Raggedy Man arrived, by happenstance, at that same base and how, by some odd stroke of chance, her friend managed to discern their identities.

I could tell there were things she was keeping from me. Things she didn’t wish me to know. But as I looked in her eyes, I knew every word of it was true.

She spoke about how her Raggedy Man, who my father reverently called the Doctor, tried to negotiate a truce and she spoke about how his attempts broke down, and the Zygons went berserk. She alluded to a bloodbath, where my father’s company was slaughtered, and she spoke of how she took charge over grown men, confused and desperate for orders.

It was almost inconceivable, but little Amelia Pond had, at the age of nine, led soldiers through a bloodbath. It was no wonder she never feared me.

“The Zygons died,” she said and, while I was inclined to cheer at that bit of news, she seemed saddened by it. “It wasn’t our intention, of course, but it was us or them, and the Doctor got us out.”

She looked at me then, with eyes that had seen war and desolation and things I could not even fathom.

“I suspect telling you all this is probably a mistake. But I figure you could use a bit of a perspective, since you’re so intent on hurting other people. You don’t grasp how cruel and horrible the universe is, and just how small you and I and every last one of us is in the grand scope of all that.”

She smiled a grim little smile. “And now, I’ll let you in on one last secret, and this is something I’m positive your father has not told you. I traveled with the Doctor, my Raggedy Man, for years, and I saw things so much more terrible than the Zygons. I’ve seen worlds plunged into nuclear fire, and wars extend across galaxies. Pray that you never have need to meet a Dalek or a Cyberman, or one of the countless other races in this universe that give me nightmares.”

She laughed bitterly. “Tell me, then, Daniel. I’ve faced wars and horrors and wonders you cannot even believe. I may look only eleven, but I’ve lived decades, most of them in some form of a war zone or another. And I am alive, unbowed and unbent. What arrogance would you possess, to make you believe yourself capable of hurting me?”

She said one last thing before she walked away.

“One thing I’ve learned in my years traveling the stars: all your sins come visiting back to you. It’s not too late to stop, Daniel. To form real friendships and give up these petty cruelties. Because I can promise you this, if you don’t give up this delinquent behavior soon, one day you’re going to regret it.”

My father and I didn’t stay in Leadworth for very long, but I’ve never been able to cast the memory of Amy Pond out of my mind. We moved to London, and I found that I no longer had the stomach for petty bullying. Amy’s final message kept reverberating in my mind, and I resolved myself to change my ways.

And I’ve never once regretted it.

On occasion, I’ll ask my father about his time at UNIT, or about his encounters with the Doctor. He was surprised when I first broached that topic, shortly after Amy finally spoke to me. I had never been interested in that day before.

I told him about a small girl, with big dreams and big ideals who had seen true horrors, who had traveled the stars, and who had taken it upon herself to irrevocably alter the course of my life.

We shared a smile.


	2. The Morning After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amy traversed all of time and space, and then she came home.

It was a Sunday morning, and Rory Williams exited his front door, crossed the yard, and walked towards the Pond house. The weatherman had promised rain and already the skies were turning grey. But Rory, like many children of his age and temperament, was determined to get as much playtime in as he could, before the rains started.

Amelia Pond had been his best friend for the past two years, a stubborn young girl with a fierce temper. She usually slept in on weekends so he was surprised when, upon completing his journey, he saw her sitting on her front porch, gazing up at the sky with a sad expression on her face. Her nose was running and she looked as if she might have been crying for days.

He was concerned. In all their years as friends, he had never seen her cry.

“Amy?” he asked, reaching out to her.

She looked up at him, and a small smile gleaned between her tear stained cheeks. “It’s been a while.”

“It’s only been yesterday,” he said.

A small hint of amusement filtered through her sadness.

“It may as well been years,” she said.

Rory frowned, and his confusion was obvious from the look on his face.

She smiled, “Have you ever had an imaginary friend?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. All children should find a raggedy man of their own.” She rose from her doorstep, “I’ve been handed a second chance you see.”

“I don’t understand.”

She turned to look at him, truly look at him, and in that moment, with her gaze fully set upon him, she looked so much older than her seven years could express. Her eyes held something in them that reminded him of his grandfather, who fought in the Great War against Hitler, and of his father and his mother, who together each day worked the emergency room in the Hospital, sometimes sharing long hours deep into the night. Her eyes hinted at something old and wary and most decidedly not childlike.

She spoke, and for all that her voice sounded like his Amy’s, her words and the exhaustion that colored them were most decidedly not those of a seven year old.

“Life. It’s such a fragile, beautiful thing,” she said. “And I’ve traveled so far, and seen so much, and done so many things. He raised me, you know. My raggedy man and, for all his flaws and injuries, he was the best man I ever met.”

“Who?” Rory asked. For all that her story was an impossible story, for he had seen and spoken and played with her almost every day of the past two years, Rory remained a child and children have a unique capacity to believe in impossible things. And Amy was his friend. So he believed all the more.

She smiled, “He called himself the Doctor and we traveled together for decades in a box outside of time and space. But it all went wrong and so he took me back. I won’t ever see him again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You shouldn’t be. I was given a second chance at life, to start again in my own proper place and my own proper time. I have the opportunity to live my life freely, to put to work all that he taught me and all that I taught myself. How many people can say that?”

She looked up towards the sky and smiled a small, fragile smile but it was a smile all the same.

“I won’t forget him, Rory Williams, my raggedy madman in a box. For all my days until I grow old and wrinkly and my hair falls out, I shall treasure that time we shared together. But I am back here now, and for that too I am quite thankful.”

She grinned, “I’m glad you’re my friend. Always value your friends Rory, always stay true. There’s nothing so sad and terrible as to be truly alone.”

Rory didn’t know just what she meant by her words. He was only a child after all, and an experience like Amy’s is not something a child’s mind is supposed to understand. But he held fast to her words, sensing with a child’s clarity the hidden wisdom she had to offer.

In a comfortable shared silence, they sat together.

The clouds parted and the sun began to shine.


	3. Epitaph (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A scene from a funeral.

 

The evening is silent aside from the occasional chirping of the crickets, and if you look up you can see, partnering the sun in the sky above, a full moon set to take up its vigil when darkness falls. In a rare moment of good fortune, they both shine down clearly upon you. Today there is none of that incessant cloud cover, none of that fog or wind or rain which the Isles are so famed for. That being said, it is cold, and you keep yourself bundled up beneath your coat, for it is an English winter, and English winters tend to be frigid affairs.

You are not alone, amidst the gravestones. It seems, in fact, as if the entire town has gathered here, although that could just as easily be simple hyperbole. You still feel a bit numb. You first heard the news only four days ago, that old Mrs. Williams had died in her sleep, 83 years old. She had had a full life, people would say, and she was a good woman. Often kind, except for those moments where she would get this quiet intensity that could scare you to your bones, occasionally judgmental, and there was always something ever so slightly larger than life about her. She had a presence about her – some say she had had it even as a child, and wouldn’t you have loved to see that?

There are words etched out on the grave, and you can see her husband standing beside the grave, talking to a strange fellow, an older gentleman (though not quite as old as Rory it must be said) in a black suit. You remember seeing the man approach earlier, maneuvering his way through the crowd. You've never seen him before in your life, so he’s clearly not a local, but he greets Rory like an old friend, and Rory greets him with a surprised, almost joyous delight, so you can tell his regard is returned. Another woman, young and dark haired (you talked with her briefly during the ceremonies and she introduced herself as an out of towner – Clara, you think) came with him, and she even now lingers just out of sight, giving the two their proper space.

You walk up towards the gravestone.

 

Amelia Williams.

February 2, 1989 – January 19, 2073

May She Always Find The Next Adventure

 

It’s a bit of a funny epitaph, you must admit, because, as far as you know, extraordinary though her personality may well have been, in other ways her life had always been rather normal. True, they say she’d traveled the world a bit in her youth, and a few times more when she got doughty with age, and she’d certainly been an adventurous enough personality. But she’d never be the kind of person you’d find in the history books or in the movies. She wasn’t a politician or a model or an actress and, from what you know of her, she’d never done anything all that extraordinary, but then again you suppose, that’s never been what epitaphs were about and adventures certainly don’t need to be extraordinary things. In any case, it must be said that, based on from everything you’ve seen and heard about her, normal though her life may have been, she'd certainly treated it as something extraordinary.

“You’ve certainly been quiet,” you hear a voice say beside you. You turn to find the girl from earlier, the stranger from out of town.

“Clara, right?”

The girl smiles kindly and shakes your hand. “Did you know her?”

You shake your head, “She was a bit older than me.”

“Way I figure, age doesn’t matter all that much. My friend over there,” she points now towards Rory and the older gentleman in the black suit. “Now he’s way older than either of us.”

You chuckle at that, “You make a good point. Did you know her?”

She shakes her head, “No. The Doctor and her, they went back before my time, but she made quite the impression on him. Call it woman's intuition if you'd like. Really makes a girl curious though.”

You shrug, “I suppose. To be honest, I never knew her all that well. She was nice enough I suppose, but then again I get the feeling that none of us really knew her all that well. Excepting her husband of course.”

The girl smiles, all catlike, “Now that I can relate to.”

She disappears back into the crowd before you can question that statement, leaving yet another enigma in her wake. You take one last look at the gravestone. At that epitaph, and you wonder, and not for the first time either, about the woman, that ordinary extraordinary woman, whose name and existence would likely be swallowed up by the passing of another generation or two, forgotten with only this one gravestone as testament that she had ever lived at all.

You light your cigarette and take a long slow drag. It’s almost sad, you suppose, how everything gets stripped away with time.

You can’t even begin to fathom how wrong you are.

 

***

 

Encyclopedia Britannica (copyright, 200,043)

Biographic Entry: Pond, Amelia.

Suggested Cross-References: Williams, Amelia; Williams, Rory; The Doctor; Song, River; Kovarian, Alyssa.

Her entry, once fully loaded, contains close to one hundred pages.


	4. Portraitures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amelia Pond and the Doctor meet with Vincent Van Gough many times over the years. Perhaps they made a difference after all.

 

Many people have called him many things. A drunk. A wastrel. An utter failure and a blight upon the artist’s craft. He holds the gun in his hand, pistol cocked beside a ruined ear, and, through his melancholy, the artist smiles.

They never did, did they?

Oh, but he can remember the first time he saw her, way back when he was a boy, maybe no older than ten. It’s difficult to remember sometimes, and he hadn’t quite yet learned to appreciate their times together.

She was a woman grown, he’d estimate in her thirties, with red hair and green eyes and clothes which looked real funny to his nineteenth century tastes. Then again, they would, wouldn’t they? Considering when she’d come from, and where.

She’d smiled at him, kind and gentle as she looked towards a drawing he’d been trying. He wasn’t all that good, not by his standards at least. Still unlearned. Still unproven.

“You just wait Vincent,” she said, and there was a certainty in her eyes. A gleam he couldn’t quite ignore.

He can’t remember what he said to her, or much of the conversation which followed. So much has been lost in the passing of time, but she believed in him. She knew, even then, some inkling of what he could one day become.

“You have the potential for greatness Vincent Van Gough,” she had said, and he could still remember that, even when everything else has faded. “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

That was his first encounter with Amelia Pond, but he supposes that it wasn’t her first with him. Oh, how he knows otherwise. She first met him much later in life, when he was a man grown but not yet entirely worn down by the passing of time.

She had been a child then. Maybe seven, maybe eight (he never was all that good at identifying ages), and she was accompanied by a man he supposed must have been her father. An overactive, easily excited young man with dark hair, who dressed in tweed and wore a bow tie.

“You’re Vincent Van Gough,” she said, marching up towards him, excited and happy as only a child could be, and the man scurried forwards as well, right behind, with an energy he could almost call demonic.

“Yes,” the man said, leaning forwards and grasping the artist’s hand in his own, shaking it with reckless abandon. “Vincent Van Gough, hello, I’m the Doctor, and I must say, this is a pleasure. Really big fan of your work. Starry Night is a personal fav.”

“Starry what?” the young painter asked.

“Oh,” the Doctor paused, and for a moment he looked utterly mortified. “I suppose you haven’t painted that yet. Forget I said anything at all, old chap.”

His spirits returned just as quickly, and he turned towards his companion, and he crowed. “See Amanda? I told you I could do it.”

The girl skipped forwards, looked the artist in the eye, and curtsied, all polite and proper. Behind her, the Doctor wore a smug smirk. “See, I taught her manners.”

“I’m Amy,” the girl chimed in. “I learned about you in school. Have you painted anything with sunflowers yet?”

“Perhaps,” Vincent Van Gough said with a small smile. “Do you like sunflowers?”

“Rory does, though Rory’s not much like other boys.”

“Well,” the Doctor interrupted, “I for one love sunflowers, and I’m sure Amy does too. Yes sir, we both love sunflowers.”

The artist looked at the man askew, not quite sure what to make of him. From the child, such naivete and exuberance was to be expected but from a man grown, it was a bit off putting.

“See?” the Doctor said, turning towards his child friend. “Told you we’d have fun.”

And so introductions had been made, decades apart, and for the rest of his life, those two would be the most stalwart friends and confidantes he’d ever have the pleasure to know. Amelia Pond and the Doctor.

They’d flit in from time to time, and sometimes he’d be waiting for months and other times a matter of days. He sees her again on her thirteenth birthday, and then as a woman grown. Eventually, she brings along a boy on the cusp of manhood who, who she claimed wanted badly to one day be a Nurse. To save lives.

“So, you’re Rory then?” he asked when they first met, shaking hands beneath a cloudless sky.

“She told you about me?” the lover asked, scratching his head in bemusement.

The artist smiled. “She said you liked sunflowers.”

Rory was rendered speechless.

And so the teenage friends became twenty year old lovers, and the lovers became newlyweds, and he met them then as well, just after their honeymoon had ended, and wasn’t that the interesting tale? And always, even as Amy and Rory ripened with maturity, aged like fine wine, the Doctor remained the same. Ageless. Simultaneously forever young and so very old.

Last week, he met her for the final time. She was older, her skin wrinkled, stripped of much of its color. Grey hair the color of iron fell listless upon stooped shoulders.

He frowned to see her in such a state, recognizing the old crone soon enough for who she truly was.

“It’s been a while,” she said, hobbling over, and he just stared, as the words died in his throat. She looked up at him then, at the ruination of his ear and the bottle of wine which now always stood upon his table.

“Did you live a good life?” she finally asked, sounding so very tired and yet so very intent on hearing his answer. She caught his eyes with her own and what he saw there was a desperation, an intensity, and after all these years, he still couldn’t deny her. Never her.

“Could’ve been worse,” he said, helping her into the chair, and then taking the next one over. He began pouring a second glass of wine. “But that’s the way life is I suppose. Bit of good, bit of bad.”

“Indeed,” she said and he offered her a glass of wine and she laughed, accepting it with good cheer.

“At this point, I suppose one more drink couldn’t hurt, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

He felt something painful clench in his heart. “So you’re dying then?”

She waved off his concern, shaking her head fondly. “No, no. Lord,I hope not.” She took a sip of wine, and then continued. “Something came up and I had to make a choice. Rash and stupid, I’ll have you know, but if I had to do it all over again, I’d make the same jump. The joys are worth the pain, hwen he’s involved.”

She could have been speaking about the Doctor, or she could have been speaking about her husband. The artist never did ask. Would’ve been too forwards, and he supposed he had too much respect for Amelia Pond to pry such secrets from her. He simply smiled, and they toasted.

“To life, and all its joys and sorrows,” said the artist, holding up his glass.

“Hear, hear,” said Amelia Pond.

Basking in each other’s company, they shared a quiet drink, and then Vincent Van Gough repeated the same question she had posed him earlier.

“Excuse me?” she asked, momentarily startled.

“Did you live a good life?” he repeated.

She smiled, and it was that same smile as before, that Mona Lisa smile she would sometimes flash at him, filled with compassion and respect and admiration and so many hidden secrets he couldn’t venture to guess. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes and her expression lightened and, though she remained stooped and weathered, with hair as grey as ore, in spirit she could have still been the same young woman he’d met at twelve.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I’ve been married to wonderful man, and lived a glorious fantasy. I’ve seen the stars, you know, and so many places you wouldn’t believe.”

“But it’s all gone now.”

She shook her head, “It’s never gone. It all stays with you, in one way or another. Right to the end.”

That was the end, and then he walked her back to that old blue box, and he heard her greet Rory, who still resembled a man in the prime of life.

“I’m going to be young again,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” said her husband.

She cupped his cheek, and Vincent turned away, began to walk home. He had been intruding upon something powerful. Private.

“Don’t be,” her words echoed behind him. “All this, we only get one chance of adventures like this, and Lord knows the Doctor needs the company. I had years without you, don’t you remember? And I suppose we knew this day would eventually come, yeah?”

He heard the Tardis door close behind him and, with stutters and stalls, the Blue Box vanished into oblivion. The artist returned to his house, lit his pipe and settled back into his chair, and thought about the wonder and absurdity that was his life.

And now, a week later, the artist opens his eyes. He holds the gun in his hand and remembers all those many meetings and a friendship which has transcended time itself. The gun looks so very welcome sometimes. Especially on days like this, when his melancholy becomes something stifling and oppressive and he can almost hear it calling out to him.

He doesn’t know how long he can keep going. But he thinks back to the woman with the red hair and the gentle eyes and so much presence. She’d have wanted him to continue living, if even for just one more day.

Vincent Van Gough puts the revolver down, lays it carefully upon the table, and begins to paint.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Stratagemi on Spacebattles for prompting a chapter featuring Vincent Van Gough.


End file.
